When the Steed family relocates to upstate New York from their long-time home in Vermont, religious strife threatens to destroy their close-knit relationship in director Russel Holt's screen adaptation of author Gerald N. Lund's best-selling romance novel. A hardworking family whose struggle to adapt to the ways of Palmyra is complicated when they find that their hired help is embedded in a tense religious controversy. The Steeds' situation grows increasingly dire when both siblings fall for the daughter of a wealthy merchant. The more the family struggles to unbind themselves from the all-consuming religious firestorm, the tighter they are bound to a town that could shake the very foundation of their existence.